Observations on the Danger of Female Curiosity: Including an account of the unnatural tendencies arising on the over-stimulation of the mind of a lady

Winner of three Golden Crown Literary Awards. What if your destiny as a wife doesn't match your curiosity as a scientist? An eighteenth-century heiress, an obligation, and an unfortunate fascination for physics, fossils, flowers and... ladies...? Thea Morell, Georgian heiress and eligible lady, is not normal. At least, that’s what she has come to believe. She loves nothing more than spending hours at the study of natural history, collecting fossils, insects, dead fish, bones and even the odd spider. Up to now, she has held off her mother’s entreaties to marry, but this year may be her last chance to make a good match and the pressure is mounting. In her search for scientific truth, Thea also begins to acknowledge a truth about herself - a most inconvenient one which sparks at the lips of the ‘electrical venus’ and bursts into flame in the presence of the very proper Lady Eleanor Harrington. Despite her attempts to observe and understand, this particular truth defies all rationalisation. Has her obsession with the male-dominated world of natural history caused the unnatural tendencies she can’t seem to control? And more importantly, can she protect her family’s interests whilst reconciling the dual passions of her mind and her heart? “At once the easiest truth to know, and the hardest to realise”